"It's different but it's very pretty out here."

 

? NEIL ARMSTRONG, July 20, 1969

 

DAYS, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade. One Saturday in August Buchanan approaches Rabbit during the coffee break. They are part of the half?crew working the half?day; hence perhaps this intimacy. The Negro wipes from his lips the moisture of the morning whisky enjoyed outside in the sunshine of the loading platform, and asks, "How're they treatin' you, Harry?"

 

"They?" Harry has known the other man by sight and name for years but still is not quite easy, talking to a black; there always seems to be some joke involved, that he doesn't quite get.

 

"The world, man."

 

"Not bad."

 

Buchanan stands there blinking, studying, jiggling up and down on his feet engagingly. Hard to tell how old they are. He might be thirty?five, he might be sixty. On his upper lip he wears the smallest possible black mustache, smaller than a type brush. His color is ashy, without any shine to it, whereas the other shop Negro, Farnsworth, looks shoe?polished and twinkles among the printing machinery, under the steady shadowless light. "But not good, huh?"

 

"I'm not sleeping so good," Rabbit does confess. He has an itch, these days, to confess, to spill, he is so much alone.

 

"Your old lady still shackin' up across town?"

 

Everybody knows. Niggers, coolies, derelicts, morons. Numbers writers, bus conductors, beauty shop operators, the entire brick city of Brewer. VERITY EMPLOYEE NAMED CUCKOLD OF WEEK. Angstrom Accepts Official Hornsfrom Mayor. "I'm living alone," Harry admits, adding, "with the kid."

 

"How about that," Buchanan says, lightly rocking. "How about that?"

 

Rabbit says weakly, "Until things straighten out."

 

"Gettin' any tail?"

 

Harry must look startled, for Buchanan hastens to explain, "Man has to have tail. Where's your dad these days?" The ques-tion flows from the assertion immediately, though it doesn't seem to follow.

 

Rabbit says, puzzled, offended, but because Buchanan is a Negro not knowing how to evade him, "He's taking two weeks off so he can drive my mother back and forth to the hospital for some tests."

 

"Years." Buchanan mulls, the two pushed?out cushions of his mouth appearing to commune with each other through a hum; then a new thought darts out through them, making his mustache jig. "Your dad is a real pal to you, that's a wonderful thing. That is a truly wonderful thing. I never had a dad like that, I knew who the man was, he was around town, but he was never my dad in the sense your dad is your dad. He was never my pal like that."

 

Harry hangs uncertainly, not knowing if he should commiser-ate or laugh. "Well," he decides to confess, "he's sort of a pal, and sort of a pain in the neck."

 

Buchanan likes the remark, even though he goes through pep-pery motions of rejecting it. "Oh, never say that now. You just be grateful you have a dad that cares. You don't know, man, how lucky you have it. Just 'cause your wife's gettin' her ass looked after elsewhere don't mean the whole world is come to some bad end. You should be havin' your tail, is all. You're a big fella. "

 

Distaste and excitement contend in Harry; he feels tall and pale beside Buchanan, and feminine, a tingling target of fun and ten-derness and avarice mixed. Talking to Negroes makes him feel itchy, up behind the eyeballs, maybe because theirs look so semi-liquid and yellow in the white and sore. Their whole beings seem lubricated in pain. "I'll manage," he says reluctantly, thinking of Peggy Fosnacht.

 

The end?of?break bell rings. Buchanan snaps his shoulders into a hunch and out of it as if rendering a verdict. "How about it, Harry, steppin' out with some of the boys tonight," he says. "Come on into Jimbo's Lounge around nine, ten, see what dev-elops. Maybe nothin'. Maybe sumpthin'. You're just turnin' old, the way you're goin' now. Old and fat and finicky, and that's no way for a nice big man to go." He sees that Rabbit's instincts are to refuse; he holds up a quick palm the color of silver polish and says, "Think about it. I like you, man. If you don't show, you don't show. No sweat."

 

 

 

All Saturday the invitation hums in his ears. Something in what Buchanan said. He was lying down to die, had been lying down 'for years. His body had been telling him to. His eyes blur print in the afternoons, no urge to run walking even that stretch of tempt-ing curved sidewalk home, has to fight sleep before supper and then can't get under at night, can't even get it up to jerk off to relax himself. Awake with the first light every morning regardless, another day scraping his eyes. Without going much of anywhere in his life he has somehow seen everything too often. Trees, weather, the molding trim drying its cracks wider around the front door, he notices every day going out, house made of green wood. No belief in an afterlife, no hope for it, too much more ofthe same thing, already it seems he's lived twice. When he came back to Janice that began the second time for him; poor kid is having her first time now. Bless that dope. At least she had the drive to get out. Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fight-ing off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.

 

Once last week he called the lot to find out if she and Stavros were reporting for work or just screwing around the clock. Mildred Kroust answered, she put him on to Janice, who whis-pered, "Harry, Daddy doesn't know about us, don't ever call me here, I'll call you back." And she had called him late that after-noon, at the house, Nelson in the other room watching Gilligan's Island, and said cool as you please, he hardly knew her voice, "Harry, I'm sorry for whatever pain this is causing you, truly sorry, but it's very important that at this point in our lives we don't let guilt feelings motivate us. I'm trying to look honestly into myself, to see who I am, and where I should be going. I want us both, Harry, to come to a decision we can live with. It's the year nine-teen sixty?nine and there's no reason for two mature people to smother each other to death simply out of inertia. I'm searching for a valid identity and I suggest you do the same." After some more of this, she hung up. Her vocabulary had expanded, maybe she was watching a lot of psychiatric talk shows. The sinners shall be justified. Screw her. Dear Lord, screw her. He is thinking this on the bus.

 

He thinks, Screw her, and at home has a beer and takes a bath and puts on his good summer suit, a light gray sharkskin, and gets Nelson's pajamas out of the dryer and his toothbrush out of the bathroom. The kid and Billy have arranged for him to spend the night. Harry calls up Peggy to check it out. "Oh absolutely," she says, "I'm not going anywhere, why don't you stay and have dinner?"

 

"I can't I don't think."

 

"Why not? Something else to do?"

 

"Sort of." He and the kid go over around six, on an empty bus. Already at this hour Weiser has that weekend up?tempo, cars hurrying faster home to get out again, a very fat man with orange hair standing under an awning savoring a cigar as if angels will shortly descend, an expectant shimmer on the shut storefronts, girls clicking along with heads big as rose?bushes, curlers wrapped in a kerchief. Saturday night. Peggy meets him at the door with an offer of a drink. She and Billy live in an apartment in one of the new eight?story buildings in West Brewer overlooking the river, where there used to be a harness racetrack. From her living room she has a panorama of Brewer, the concrete eagle on the skyscraper Court House flaring his wings above the back of the Owl Pretzels sign. Beyond the flowerpot?red city Mt. Judge hangs smoky?green, one side gashed by a gravel pit like a roast begin-ning to be carved. The river coal black.

 

"Maybe just one. I gotta go somewhere."

 

"You said that. What kind of drink?" She is wearing a clingy palish?purple sort of Paisley mini that shows a lot of heavy leg. One thing Janice always had, was nifty legs. Peggy has a pasty helpless look of white meat behind the knees.

 

"You have Daiquiri mix?"

 

"I don't know, Ollie used to keep things like that, but when we moved I think it all stayed with him." She and Ollie Fosnacht had lived in an asbestos?shingled semi?detached some blocks away, not far from the county mental hospital. Ollie lives in the city now, near his music store, and she and the kid have this apart-ment, with Ollie in their view if they can find him. She is rum-maging in a low cabinet below some empty bookcases. "I can't see any, it comes in envelopes. How about gin and something?"

 

"You have bitter lemon?"

 

More rummaging. "No, just some tonic."

 

"Good enough. Want me to make it?"

 

"If you like." She stands up, heavy?legged, lightly sweating, relieved. Knowing he was coming, Peggy had decided against sunglasses, a sign of trust to leave them off. Her walleyes are naked to him, her face has this helpless look, turned full toward him while both eyes seem fascinated by something in the corners of the ceiling. He knows only one eye is bad but he never can bring him-self to figure out which. And all around her eyes this net of white wrinkles the sunglasses usually conceal.

 

He asks her, "What for you?"

 

"Oh, anything. The same thing. I drink everything."

 

While he is cracking an ice tray in the tiny kitchenette, the two boys have snuck out of Billy's bedroom. Rabbit wonders if they have been looking at dirty photographs. The kind of pictures kids used to have to pay an old cripple on Plum Street a dollar apiece for you can buy a whole magazine full of now for seventy?five cents, right downtown. The Supreme Court, old men letting the roof cave in. Billy is a head taller than Nelson, sunburned where Nelson takes a tan after his mother, both of them with hair down over their ears, the Fosnacht boy's blonder and curlier. "Mom, we want to go downstairs and run the mini?bike on the parking lot."

 

"Come back up in an hour," Peggy tells them, "I'll give you supper."

 

"Nelson had a peanut?butter sandwich before we left," Rabbit explains.

 

"Typical male cooking," Peggy says. "Where're you going this evening anyway, all dressed up in a suit?"

 

"Nowhere much. I told a guy I might meet him." He doesn't say it is a Negro. He should be asking her out, is his sudden frightened feeling. She is dressed to go out; but not so dolled?up it can't appear she plans to stay home tonight. He hands her her g.?and?t. The best defense is to be offensive. "You don't have any mint or limes or anything."

 

Her plucked eyebrows lift. "No, there are lemons in the fridge, is all. I could run down to the grocery for you." Not entirely ironical: using his complaint to weave coziness.

 

Rabbit laughs to retract. "Forget it, I'm just used to bars, where they have everything. At home all I ever do is drink beer."

 

She laughs in answer. She is tense as a schoolteacher facing her first class. To relax them both he sits down in a loose leather armchair that says pfsshhu. "Hey, this is nice," he announces, meaning the vista, but he spoke too early, for from this low chair the view is flung out of sight and becomes all sky: a thin bright wash, stripes like fat in bacon.

 

"You should hear Ollie complain about the rent." Peggy sits down not in another chair but on the flat grille where the radiator breathes beneath the window, opposite and above him, so he sees a lot of her legs ? shiny skin stuffed to the point of shapelessness. Still, she is showing him what she has, right up to the triangle of underpants, which is one more benefit of being alive in 1969. Miniskirts and those magazines: well, hell, we've always known women had crotches, why not make it legal? A guy at the shop brought in a magazine that, honestly, was all cunts, in blurred bad four?color but cunts, upside down, backwards, the girls attached to them rolling their tongues in their mouths and fanning their hands on their bellies and otherwise trying to hide how silly they felt. Homely things, really, cunts. Without the Supreme Court that might never have been made clear.

 

"Hey, how is old Ollie?"

 

Peggy shrugs. "He calls. Usually to cancel his Sunday with Billy. You know he never was the family man you are."

 

Rabbit is surprised to be called that. He is getting too tame. He asks her, "How does he spend his time?"

 

"Oh," Peggy says, and awkwardly turns her body so Rabbit sees pricked out in windowlight the tonic bubbles in her drink, which is surprisingly near drunk, "he rattles around Brewer with a bunch of creeps. Musicians, mostly. They go to Philadelphia a lot, and New York. Last winter he went skiing at Aspen and told me all about it, including the girls. He came back so brown in the face, I cried for days. I could never get him outdoors, when we had the place over on Franklin Street. How do you spend your time?"

 

"I work. I mope around the house with the kid. We look at the boob tube and play catch in the back yard."

 

"Do you mope for her, Harry?" With a clumsy shrug of her hip the woman moves off her radiator perch, her walleyes staring to either side of him so he thinks he is her target and flinches. ?But she floats past him and, clattering, refills her drink. "Want another?"

 

"No thanks, I'm still working on this one. I gotta go in a minute."

 

"So soon," she croons unseen, as if remembering the beginning of a song in her tiny kitchenette. From far below their windows arises the razzing, coughing sound of the boys on the mini?bike. The noise swoops and swirls, a rude buzzard. Beyond it across the river hangs the murmur of Brewer traffic, constant like the sea; an occasional car toots, a wink of phosphorescence. From the kitchenette, as if she had been baking the thought in the oven, Peggy calls, "She's not worth it." Then her body is at his back, her voice upon his head. "I didn't know," she says, "you loved her so much. I don't think Janice knew it either."

 

"Well, you get used to somebody. Anyway, it's an insult. With a wop like that. You should hear him run down the U.S. government." ,

 

"Harry, you know what I think. I'm sure you know what I think."

 

He doesn't. He has no idea. She seems to think he's been reading thoughts printed on her underpants.

 

"I think she's treated you horribly. The last time we had lunch together, I told her so. I said, 'Janice, your attempts to justify yourself do not impress me. You've left a man who came back to you when you needed him, and you've left your son at a point in his development when it's immensely important to have a stable home setting.' I said that right to her face."

 

"Actually the kid goes over to the lot pretty much and sees her there. She and Stavros take him out to eat. In a way it's like he gained an uncle."

 

"You're so forgiving, Harry! Ollie would have strangled me; he's still immensely jealous. He's always asking me who my boyfriends are."

 

He doubts she has any, and sips his drink. Although in this county women with big bottoms usually don't go begging. Dutchmen love bulk. He says, "Well, I don't know if I did such a great job with Janice. She has to live too."

 

"Well Harry, if that's your reasoning, we all have to live." And from the way she stands there in front of him, if he sat up straight her pussy would be exactly at his nose. Hair tickles: he might sneeze. He sips the drink again, and feels the tasteless fluid expand his inner space. He might sit up at any minute, if she doesn't watch out. From the hair on her head probably a thick springy bush, though you can't always tell, some of the cunts in the magazine just had wisps at the base of their bellies, hardly an armpit's worth. Dolls. She moves away saying, "Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want."

 

"What about what poor old God wants?"

 

The uncalled?for noun jars her from the seductive pose she has assumed, facing out the window, her backside turned to him. The dog position. Tip her over a chair and let her fuss herself with her fingers into coming while he does it from behind. Janice got so she preferred it, more animal, she wasn't distracted by the look on his face, never was one for wet kisses, when they first started going together complained she couldn't breathe, he asked her if she had adenoids. Seriously. No two alike, a billion cunts in the world, snowflakes. Touch them right they melt. What we most protect is where we want to be invaded. Peggy leaves her drink on the sill like a tall jewel and turns to him with her deformed face open. Since the word has been sprung on her, she asks, "Don't you think God is people?"

 

"No, I think God is everything that isn't people. I guess I think that. I don't think enough to know what I think." In irritation, he stands.

 

Big against the window, a hot shadow, palish?purple edges catching the light ebbing from the red city, the dim mountain, Peggy exclaims. "Oh, you think with" ? and to assist her awkward thought she draws his shape in the air with two hands, having freed them for this gesture ?"your whole person."

 

She looks so helpless and vague there seems nothing for Harry to do but step into the outline of himself she has drawn and kiss her. Her face, eclipsed, feels large and cool. Her lips bumble on his, the spongy wax of gumdrops, yet narcotic, not quite tasteless: as a kid Rabbit loved bland candy like Dots; sitting in the movies he used to plow through three nickel boxes of them, playing with them with his tongue and teeth, playing, playing before giving himself the ecstasy of the bite. Up and down his length she bumps against him, straining against his height, touching. The strange place on her where nothing is, the strange place higher where some things are. Her haunches knot with the effort of keeping on tiptoe. She pushes, pushes: he is a cunt this one?eyed woman is coldly pushing up into. He feels her mind gutter out; she has wrapped them in a clumsy large ball of darkness.

 

Something scratches on the ball. A key in a lock. Then the door knocks. Harry and Peggy push apart, she tucks her hair back around her spread?legged eyes and runs heavily to the door and lets in the boys. They are red?faced and furious. "Mom, the fucking thing broke down again," Billy tells his mother. Nelson looks over at Harry. The boy is near tears. Since Janice left, he is silent and delicate: an eggshell full of tears.

 

"It wasn't my fault," he calls huskily, injustice a sieve in his throat. "Dad, he says it was my fault."

 

"You baby, I didn't say that exactly."

 

"You did. He did, Dad, and it wasn't."

 

"All I said was he spun out too fast. He always spins out too fast. He flipped on a loose stone, now the headlight is bent under and it won't start."

 

"If it wasn't such a cheap one it wouldn't break all the time."

 

"It's not a cheap one it's the best one there is almost and anyway you don't even have any -"

 

"I wouldn't take one if you gave it to me -'

 

"So who are you to talk."

 

"Hey, easy, easy," Harry says. "We'll get it fixed. I'll pay for it."

 

"Don't pay for it, Dad. It wasn't anybody's fault. It's just he's so spoiled."

 

"You shrimp," Billy says, and hits him, much the same way that three weeks ago Harry hit Janice, hard but seeking a spot that could take it. Harry separates them, squeezing Billy's arm so the kid clams up. This kid is going to be tough some day. Already his arm is stringy.

 

Peggy is just bringing it all into focus, her insides shifting back from that kiss. "Billy, these things will happen ifyou insist on playing so dangerously." To Harry she says, "Damn Ollie for getting it for him, I think he did it to spite me. He knows I hate machines."

 

Harry decides Billy is the one to talk to. "Hey. Billy. Shall I take Nelson back home, or do you want him to spend the night anyway?"

 

And both boys set up a wailing for Nelson to spend the night. "Dad you don't have to come for me or anything, I'll ride my bike home in the morning first thing, I left it here yesterday."

 

So Rabbit releases Billy's arm and gives Nelson a kiss somewhere around the ear and tries to find the right eye of Peggy's to look into. "Okey?doak. I'll be off."

 

She says, "Must you? Stay. Can't I give you supper? Another drink? It's early yet."

 

"This guy's waiting," Rabbit lies, and makes it around her furniture to the door.

 

Her body chases him. Her vague eyes shine in their tissuepaper sockets, and her lips have that loosened look kissed lips get; he resists the greedy urge to buy another box of Dots. "Harry," she begins, and seems to fall toward him, after a stumble, though they don't touch.

 

"Yeah?"

 

"I'm usually here. If?you know."

 

"I know. Thanks for the g.?and?t. Your view is great." He reaches then and pats, not her ass exactly, the flank at the side of it, too broad, too firm, alive enough under his palm, it turns out, to make him wonder, when her door closes, why he is going down the elevator, and out.

 

It is too early to meet Buchanan. He walks back through the West Brewer side streets toward Weiser, through the dulling summer light and the sounds of distant games, of dishes rattled in kitchen sinks, of television muffled to a murmur mechanically laced with laughter and applause, of cars driven by teenagers laying rubber and shifting down. Children and old men sit on the porch steps beside the lead?colored milk?bottle boxes. Some stretches of sidewalk are brick; these neighborhoods, the oldest in West Brewer, close to the river, are cramped, gentle, barren. Between the trees there is a rigid flourishing of hydrants, meters, and signs, some of them ? virtual billboards in white on green directing motorists to superhighways whose number is blazoned on the federal shield or on the commonwealth keystone; from these obscure West Brewer byways, sidewalks and asphalt streets rumpled comfortably as old clothes, one can be arrowed toward Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington the national capital, New York the headquarters of commerce and fashion. Or in the other direction can find Pittsburgh and Chicago. But beneath these awesome metal insignia of vastness and motion fat men in undershirts loiter, old ladies move between patches of gossip with the rural waddle of egg?gatherers, dogs sleep curled beside the cooling curb, and children with hockey sticks and tape?handled bats diffidently chip at whiffle balls and wads of leather, whittling themselves into the next generation of athletes and astronauts. Rabbit's eyes sting in the dusk, in this smoke of his essence, these harmless neighborhoods that have gone to seed. So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls. He stops at a corner grocery for a candy bar, an Oh Henry, then at the Burger Bliss on Weiser, dazzling in its lake of parking space, for a Lunar Special (double cheeseburger with an American flag stuck into the bun) and a vanilla milkshake, that tastes toward the bottom of chemical sludge.

 

The interior of Burger Bliss is so bright that his fingernails, with their big mauve moons, gleam and the coins he puts down in payment seem cartwheels of metal. Beyond the lake of light, unfriendly darkness. He ventures out past a dimmed drive?in bank and crosses the bridge. High slender arc lamps on giant flower stems send down a sublunar light by which the hurrying cars all appear purple. There are no other faces but his on the bridge. From the middle, Brewer seems a web, to which glowing droplets adhere. Mt. Judge is one with the night. The luminous smudge of the Pinnacle Hotel hangs like a star.

 

Gnats bred by the water brush Rabbit's face; Janice's desertion nags him from within, a sore spot in his stomach. Ease off beer and coffee. Alone, he must take care of himself. Sleeping alone, he dreads the bed, watches the late shows, Carson, Griffin, cocky guys with nothing to sell but their brass. Making millions on sheer gall. American dream: when he first heard the phrase as a kid he pictured God lying sleeping, the quilt?colored map of the U.S. coming out of his head like a cloud. Peggy's embrace drags at his limbs. Suit feels sticky. Jimbo's Friendly Lounge is right off the Brewer end of the bridge, a half?block down from Plum. Inside it, all the people are black.

 

Black to him is just a political word but these people really are, their faces shine of blackness turning as he enters, a large soft white man in a sticky gray suit. Fear travels up and down his skin, but the music of the great green?and?mauve?glowing jukebox called Moonmood slides on, and the liquid of laughter and tickled muttering resumes flowing; his entrance was merely a snag. Rabbit hangs like a balloon waiting for a dart; then his elbow is jostled and Buchanan is beside him.

 

"Hey, man, you made it." The Negro has materialized from the smoke. His overtrimmed mustache looks wicked in here.

 

"You didn't think I would?"

 

"Doubted it," Buchanan says. "Doubted it severely."

 

"It was your idea."

 

"Right. Harry, you are right. I'm not arguing, I am rejoicing. Let's fix you up. You need a drink, right?"

 

"I don't know, my stomach's getting kind of sensitive."

 

"You need two drinks. Tell me your poison."

 

"Maybe a Daiquiri?"

 

"Never. That is a lady's drink for salad luncheons. Rufe, you old rascal."

 

"Yazzuh, yazzuh," comes the answer from the bar.

 

"Do a Stinger for the man."

 

"Yaz?zuh."

 

Rufe has a bald head like one of the stone hatchets in the Brewer Museum, only better polished. He bows into the marine underglow of the bar and Buchanan leads Rabbit to a booth in the back. The place is deep and more complicated than it appears from the outside. Booths recede and lurk: darkwood cape?shapes. Along one wall, Rufe and the lowlit bar; behind and above it, not only the usual Pabst and Bud and Miller's gimcracks bobbing and shimmering, but two stuffed small deer?heads, staring with bright brown eyes that will never blink. Gazelles, could they have been gazelles? A space away, toward a wall but with enough room for a row of booths behind, a baby grand piano, painted silver with .one ofthose spray cans, silver in circular swirls. In a room obliquely off the main room, a pool table: colored boys all arms and legs spidering around the idyllic green felt. The presence of any game reassures Rabbit. Where any game is being played a hedge exists against fury. "Come meet some soul," Buchanan says. Two shadows in the booth are a man and a woman. The man wears silver circular glasses and a little pussy of a goatee and is young. The woman is old and wrinkled and smokes a yellow cigarette that requires much sucking in and holding down and closing of the eyes and sighing. Her brown eyelids are gray, painted blue. Sweat shines below the base of her throat, on the slant bone between her breasts, as if she had breasts, which she does not, though her dress, the blood?color of a rooster's comb, is cut deep, as if she did. Before they are introduced she says "Hi" to Harry, but her eyes slit to pin him fast in the sliding of a dream.

 

"This man," Buchanan is announcing, "is a co?worker of mine, he works right beside his daddy at Ver?i?ty Press, an expert Linotypist," giving syllables an odd ticking equality, a put?on or signal of some sort? "But not only that. He is an ath?e?lete of renown, a basketball player bar none, the Big O of Brewer in his day."

 

"Very beautiful," the other dark man says. Round specs tilt, glint. The shadow of a face they cling to feels thin in the darkness. The voice arises very definite and dry.

 

"Many years ago," Rabbit says, apologizing for his bulk, his bloated pallor, his dead fame. He sits down in the booth to hide.

 

"He has the hands," the woman states. She is in a trance. She says, "Give old Babe one of those hands, white boy." A?prickle with nervousness, wanting to sneeze on the sweetish smoke, Rabbit lifts his right hand up from his lap and lays it on the slippery table. Innocent meat. Distorted paw. Reminds him of, on television, that show with chimpanzees synchronized with talk and music, the eerie look of having just missed the winning design.

 

The woman touches it. Her touch reptilian cool. Her eyes lift, brooding. Above the glistening bone her throat drips jewels, a napkin of rhinestones or maybe real diamonds; Cadillacs after all, alligator shoes, they can't put their money into real estate like whites; Springer's thrifty Toyotas not to the point. His mind is racing with his pulse. She has a silver sequin pasted beside one eye. Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous. Her eyelashes are great false crescents. That she has taken such care of herself leads him to suspect she will not harm him. His pulse slows. Her touch slithers nice as a snake. "Do dig that thumb," she advises the air. She caresses his thumb's curve. Its thin?skinned veined ball. Its colorless moon nail. "That thumb means sweetness and light. It is an indicator of pleasure in Sagittarius and Leo." She gives one knuckle an affectionate pinch.

 

The Negro not Buchanan (Buchanan has hustled to the bar to check on the Stinger) says, "Not like one of them usual little sawed?off nuggers these devils come at you with, right?"

 

Babe answers, not yielding her trance, "No, sir. This thumb here is extremely plausible. Under the right signs it would absolutely function. Now these knuckles here, they aren't so good, I don't get much music out of these knuckles." And she presses a chord on them, with fingers startlingly hard and certain. "But this here thumb," she goes back to caressing it, "is a real enough heartbreaker."

 

"All these Charlies is heartbreakers, right? Just cause they don't know how to shake their butterball asses don't mean they don't get Number One in, they gets it in real mean, right? The reason they so mean, they has so much religion, right? That big white God go tells 'em, Screw that black chick, and they really wangs away 'cause God's right there slappin' away at their butterball asses. Cracker spelled backwards is fucker, right?"

 

Rabbit wonders if this is how the young Negro really talks, wonders if there is a real way. He does not move, does not even bring back his hand from the woman's inspection, her touches chill as teeth. He is among panthers.

 

Buchanan, that old rascal, bustles back and sets before Rabbit a tall pale glass of poison and shoves in so Rabbit has to shove over opposite the other man. Buchanan's eyes check around the faces and guess it's gotten heavy. Lightly he says, "This man's wife, you know what? That woman, I never had the pleasure of meeting her, not counting those Verity picnics where Farnsworth, you all know Farnsworth now ? ?"

 

"Like a father," the young man says, adding, "Right?"

 

" ? gets me so bombed out of my mind on that barrel beer I can't remember anybody by face or name, where was I? Yes, that woman, she just upped and left him the other week, left him flat to go chasing around with some other gentleman, something like an I?talian, didn't you say Harry?"

 

"A Greek."

 

Babe clucks. "Honey, now what did he have you didn't? He must of had a thumb long as this badmouth's tongue." She nudges her companion, who retrieves from his lips this shared cigarette, which has grown so short it must burn, and sticks out his tongue. Its whiteness shocks Rabbit; a mouthful of luminous flesh. Though fat and pale, it does not look very long. This man, Rabbit sees, is a boy; the patch of goatee is all he can grow. Harry does not like him. He likes Babe, he thinks, even though she has dried hard, a prune on the bottom of the box. In here they are all on the bottom of the box. This drink, and his hand, are the whitest thing around. Not to think of the other's tongue. He sips. Too sweet, wicked. A thin headache promptly begins.

 

Buchanan is persisting, "Don't seem right to me, healthy big man living alone with nobody now to comfort him."

 

The goatee bobs. "Doesn't bother me in the slightest. Gives the man time to think, right? Gets the thought of cunt off his back, right? Chances are he has some hobby he can do, you know, like woodwork." He explains to Babe, "You know, like a lot of these peckerwoods have this clever thing they can do down in their basements, like stamp collecting, right? That's how they keep making it big. Cleverness, right?" He taps his skull, whose narrowness is padded by maybe an inch of tight black wool. The texture reminds Rabbit of his mother's crocheting, if she had used tiny metal thread. Her blue bent hands now helpless. Even in here, family sadness pokes at him, probing sore holes.

 

"I used to collect baseball cards," he tells them. He hopes to excite enough rudeness from them so he can leave. He remembers the cards' bubble?gum smell, their silken feel from the powdered sugar. He sips the Stinger.

 

Babe sees him make a face. "You don't have to drink that piss." She nudges her neighbor again. "Let's have one more stick."

 

"Woman, you must think I'm made of hay."

 

"I know you're plenty magical, that's one thing. Off that uptight shit, the ofay here needs a lift and I'm nowhere near spaced enough to pee?form."

 

"Last drag," he says, and passes her the tiny wet butt.

 

She crushes it into the Sunflower Beer ashtray. "This roach is hereby dead." And holds her thin hand palm up for a hit.

 

Buchanan is clucking. "Mother?love, go easy on yourself," he tells Babe.

 

The other Negro is lighting another cigarette; the paper is twisted at the end and flares, subsides. He passes it to her saying, "Waste is a sin, right?"

 

"Hush now. This honeyman needs to loosen up, I hate to see 'em sad, I always have, they aren't like us, they don't have the insides to accommodate it. They's like little babies that way, they passes it off to someone else." She is offering Rabbit the cigarette, moist end toward him.

 

He says, "No thanks, I gave up smoking ten years ago."

 

Buchanan chuckles, with thumb and forefinger smooths his mustache sharper.

 

The boy says, "They're going to live forever, right?"

 

Babe says, "This ain't any of that nicotine shit. This weed is kindness itself."

 

While Babe is coaxing him, Buchanan and the boy diagonally discuss his immortality. "My daddy used to say, Down home, you never did see a dead white man, any more'n you'd see a dead mule."

 

"God's on their side, right? God's white, right? He doesn't want no more Charlies up there to cut into his take, he has it just fine the way it is, him and all those black angels out in the cotton."

 

"Your mouth's gonta hurt you, boy. The man is the lay of the land down here."

 

"Whose black ass you hustling, hers or yours?"

 

"You just keep your smack in the heel of your shoe."

 

Babe is saying, "You suck it in as far as it'll go and hold it down as long as you absolutely can. It needs to mix with you."

 

Rabbit tries to comply, but coughing undoes every puff. Also he is afraid of getting "hooked," of being suddenly jabbed with a needle, of starting to hallucinate because of something dropped into his Stinger. AUTOPSY ORDERED IN FRIENDLY LOUNGE DEATH. Coroner Notes Atypical Color of Skin.

 

Watching him cough, the boy says, "He is beautiful. I didn't know they still came with all those corners. Right out of the crackerbox, right?"

 

This angers Rabbit enough to keep a drag down. It burns his throat and turns his stomach. He exhales with the relief of vomiting and waits for something to happen. Nothing. He sips the Stinger but now it tastes chemical like the bottom of that milkshake. He wonders how he can get out of here. Is Peggy's offer still open? Just to feel the muggy kiss of summer night on the Brewer streets would be welcome. Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

 

Babe asks Buchanan, "What'd you have in mind, Buck?" She is working on the joint now and the smoke includes her eyes.

 

The fat man's shrug jiggles Rabbit's side. "No big plans," Buchanan mutters. "See what develops. Woman, way you're goin', you won't be able to tell those black keys from the white."

 

She plumes smoke into his face. "Who owns who?"

 

The boy cuts in. "Ofay doesn't dig he's a john, right?"

 

Buchanan, his smoothness jammed, observes, "That mouth again."

 

Rabbit asks loudly, "What else shall we talk about?" and twiddles his fingers at Babe for the joint. Inhaling still burns, but something is starting to mesh. He feels his height above the others as a good, a lordly, thing.

 

Buchanan is probing the other two. "Jill in tonight?"

 

Babe says, "Left her back at the place."

 

The boy asks, "On a nod, right?"

 

"You stay away, hear, she got herself clean. She's on no nod, just tired from mental confusion, from fighting her signs."

 

"Clean," the boy says, "what's clean? White is clean, right? Cunt is clean, right? Shit is clean, right? There's nothin' not clean the law don't go pointing its finger at it, right?"

 

"Wrong," Babe says. "Hate is not clean. A boy like you with hate in his heart, he needs to wash."

 

"Wash is what they said to Jesus, right?"

 

"Who's Jill?" Rabbit asks.

 

"Wash is what Pilate said he thought he might go do, right? Don't go saying clean to me, Babe, that's one darkie bag they had us in too long."

 

Buchanan is still delicately prying at Babe. "She coming in?"

 

The other cuts in, "She'll be in, can't keep that cunt away; put locks on the doors, she'll ooze in the letter slot."

 

Babe turns to him in mild surprise. "Now you loves little Jill."

 

"You can love what you don't like, right?"

 

Babe hangs her head. "That poor baby," she tells the tabletop, "just going to hurt herself and anybody standing near."

 

Buchanan speaks slowly, threading his way. "Just thought, man might like to meet Jill."

 

The boy sits up. Electricity, reflected from the bar and the streets, spins around his spectacle rims. "Gonna match 'em up," he says, "you're gonna cut yourself in on an all?honky fuck. You can out?devil these devils any day, right? You could of outniggered Moses on the hill."

 

He seems to be a static the other two put up with. Buchanan is still prying at Babe across the table. "Just thought," he shrugs, "two birds with one stone."

 

A tear falls from her creased face to the tabletop. Her hair is done tight back like a schoolgirl's, a red ribbon in back. It must hurt, with kinky hair. "Going to take herself down all the way, it's in her signs, can't slip your signs."

 

"Who's that voodoo supposed to boogaboo?" the boy asks. "Whitey here got so much science he don't even need to play the numbers, right?"

 

Rabbit asks, "Is Jill white?"

 

The boy tells the two others angrily, "Cut the crooning, she'll be here, Christ, where else would she go, right? We're the blood to wash her sins away, right? Clean. Shit, that burns me. There's no dirt made that cunt won't swallow. With a smile on her face, right? Because she's clean." There seems to be not only a history but a religion behind his anger. Rabbit sees this much, that the other two are working to fix him up with this approaching cloud, this Jill, who will be pale like the Stinger, and poisonous.

 

He announces, "I think I'll go soon."

 

Buchanan swiftly squeezes his forearm. "What you want to do that for, Br'er Rabbit? You haven't achieved your objective, friend."

 

"My only objective was to be polite." She'll ooze in the letter slot: haunted by this image and the smoke inside him, he feels he can lift up from the booth, pass across Buchanan's shoulders like a shawl, and out the door. Nothing can hold him, not Mom, not Janice. He could slip a posse dribbling, Tothero used to flatter him.

 

"You going to go off half?cocked," Buchanan warns.

 

"You ain't heard Babe play," the other man says.

 

He stops rising. "Babe plays?"

 

She is flustered, stares at her thin ringless hands, fiddles, mumbles. "Let him go. Let the man run. I don't want him to hear."

 

The boy teases her. "Babe now, what sort of bad black act you putting on? He wants to hear you do your thing. Your darkie thing, right? You did the spooky card?reading bit and now you can do the banjo bit and maybe you can do the hot momma bit afterwards but it doesn't look like it right now, right?"

 

"Ease off, nigger," she says, face still bent low. "Sometime you going to lean too hard."

 

Rabbit asks her shyly, "You play the piano?"

 

"He gives me bad vibes," Babe confesses to the two black men. "Those knuckles of his aren't too good. Bad shadows in there."

 

Buchanan surprises Harry by reaching and covering her thin bare hands with one of his broadened big pressman's hands, a ring of milk?blue jade on one finger, battered bright copper on another. His other arm reaches around Harry's shoulders, heavy. "Suppose you was him," he says to Babe, "how would that make you feel?"

 

"Bad," she says. "As bad as I feel anyway."

 

"Play for me Babe," Rabbit says in the lovingness of pot, and she lifts her eyes to his and lets her lips pull back on long yellow teeth and gums the color of rhubarb stems. "Men," Babe gaily drawls. "They sure can retail the shit." She pushes herself out of the booth, hobbling in her comb?red dress, and crosses through a henscratch of applause to the piano painted as if by children in silver swirls. She signals to the bar for Rufe to turn on the blue spot and bows stiffly, once, grudging the darkness around her a smile and, after a couple of runs to burn away the fog, plays.

 

What does Babe play? All the good old ones. All show tunes. "Up a Lazy River," "You're the Top," "Thou Swell," "Summertime," you know. There are hundreds, thousands. Men from Indiana wrote them in Manhattan. They flow into each other without edges, flowing under black bridges of chords thumped six, seven times, as if Babe is helping the piano to remember a word it won't say. Or spanking the silence. Or saying, Here I am, find me, find me. Her hands, all brown bone, hang on the keyboard hushed like gloves on a table; she gazes up through blue dust to get herself into focus, she lets her hands fall into another tune: "My Funny Valentine," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," "I Can't Get Started," starting to hum along with herself now, lyrics born in some distant smoke, decades when Americans moved within the American dream, laughing at it, starving on it, but living it, humming it, the national anthem everywhere. Wise guys and hicks, straw boaters and bib overalls, fast bucks, broken hearts, penthouses in the sky, shacks by the railroad tracks, ups and downs, rich and poor, trolley cars, and the latest news by radio. Rabbit had come in on the end of it, as the world shrank like an apple going bad and America was no longer the wisest hick town within a boat ride of Europe and Broadway forgot the tune, but here it all still was, in the music Babe played, the little stairways she climbed and came tap?dancing down, twinkling in black, and there is no other music, not really, though Babe works in some Beatles songs, "Yesterday" and "Hey Jude," doing it rinky?tink, her own style of ice to rattle in the glass. As Babe plays she takes on swaying and leaning backwards; at her arms' ends the standards go root back into ragtime. Rabbit sees circus tents and fireworks and farmers' wagons and an empty sandy river running so slow the sole motion is catfish sleeping beneath the golden skin.

 

The boy leans forward and murmurs to Rabbit, "You want ass, right? You can have her. Fifty gets you her all night, all ways you can think up. She knows a lot."

 

Sunk in her music, Rabbit is lost. He shakes his head and says, "She's too good."

 

"Good, man; she got to live, right? This place don't pay her shit."

 

Babe has become a railroad, prune?head bobbing, napkin of jewels flashing blue, music rolling through crazy places, tunnels of dissonance and open stretches of the same tinny thin note bleeding itself into the sky, all sad power and happiness worn into holes .like shoe soles. From the dark booths around voices call out in a mutter "Go Babe" and "Do it, do it." The spidery boys in the adjacent room are frozen around the green felt. Into the mike that is there no bigger than a lollipop she begins to sing, sings in a voice that is no woman's voice at all and no man's, is merely human, the words of Ecclesiastes. A time to be born, a time to die. A time to gather up stones, a time to cast stones away. Yes. The Lord's last word. There is no other word, not really. Her singing opens up, grows enormous, frightens Rabbit with its enormous black maw of truth yet makes him overjoyed that he is here; he brims with joy, to be here with these black others, he wants to shout love through the darkness of Babe's noise to the sullen brother in goatee and glasses. He brims with this itch but does not spill. For Babe stops. As if suddenly tired or insulted Babe breaks off the song and shrugs and quits.

 

That is how Babe plays.

 

She comes back to the table stooped, trembling, nervous, old.

 

"That was beautiful, Babe," Rabbit tells her.

 

"It was," says another voice. A small white girl is standing there prim, in a white dress casual and dirty as smoke.

 

"Hey. Jill," Buchanan says.

 

"Hi Buck. Skeeter, hi."

 

So Skeeter is his name. He scowls and looks at the cigarette of which there is not even butt enough to call a roach.

 

` Jilly?love," Buchanan says, standing until his thighs scrape the table edge, "allow me to introduce. Harry the Rabbit Angstrom, he works at the printing plant with me, along with his daddy."

 

"He has a daddy?" Jill asks, still looking at Skeeter, who will not look at her.

 

"Jilly, you go sit in here where I am," Buchanan says. "I'll go get a chair from Rufe."

 

"Down, baby," Skeeter says. "I'm splitting." No one offers to argue with him. Perhaps they are all as pleased as Rabbit to see him go.

 

Buchanan chuckles, he rubs his hands. His eyes keep in touch with all of them, even though Babe seems to be dozing. He says to Jill, "How about a beverage? A 7?Up? Rufe can make a lemonade even."

 

"Nothing," Jill says. Teaparty manner. Hands in lap. Thin arms. Freckles. Rabbit scents in her the perfume of class. She excites him.

 

"Maybe she'd like a real drink," he says. With a white woman here he feels more in charge. Negroes, you can't blame them, haven't had his advantages. Slave ships, cabins, sold down the river, Ku Klux Klan, James Earl Ray: Channel 44 keeps having these documentaries all about it.

 

"I'm under age," Jill tells him politely.

 

Rabbit says, "Who cares?"

 

She answers, "The police."

 

"Not up the street they wouldn't mind so much," Buchanan explains, "if the girl halfway acted the part, but down here they get a touch fussy."

 

"The fuzz is fussy," Babe says dreamily. "The fuzz is our fussy friends. The fuzzy motherfuckers fuss."

 

"Don't, Babe," Jill begs. "Don't pretend."

 

"You let your old black mamma have a buzz on," Babe says. "Don't I take good care of you mostly?"

 

"How would the police know if this kid has a drink?" Rabbit asks, willing to be indignant.

 

Buchanan makes his high short wheeze. "Friend Harry, they'd just have to turn their heads."

 

"There're cops in here?"

 

"Friend" ? and from the way he sidles closer Harry feels he's found another father? "if it weren't for po?lice spies, poor Jimbo's wouldn't sell two beers a night. Po?lice spies are the absolute backbone of local low life. They got so many plants going, that's why they don't dare shoot in riots, for fear of killing one of their own."

 

"Like over in York."

 

Jill asks Rabbit, "Hey. You live in Brewer?" He sees that she doesn't like his being white in here, and smiles without answering. Screw you, little girl.

 

Buchanan answers for him. "Lady, does he live in Brewer? If he lived any more in Brewer he'd be a walking advertisement. He'd be the Owl Pretzel owl. I don't think this fella's ever gotten above Twelfth Street, have you Harry?"

 

"A few times. I was in Texas in the Army, actually."

 

"Did you get to fight?" Jill asks. Something scratchy here, but maybe like a kitten it's the way of making contact.

 

"I was all set to go to Korea," he says. "But they never sent me." Though at the time he was grateful, it has since eaten at him, become the shame of his life. He had never been a fighter but now there is enough death in him so that in a way he wants to kill.

 

"Now Skeeter," Buchanan is saying, "he's just back from Vietnam."

 

"That's why he so rude," Babe offers.

 

"I couldn't tell if he was rude or not," Rabbit confesses.

 

"That's nice," Buchanan says.

 

"He was rude," Babe says.

 

Jill's lemonade arrives. She is still girl enough to look happy when it is set before her: cakes at the teaparty. Her face lights up. A crescent of lime clings to the edge of the glass; she takes it off and sucks and makes a sour face. A child's plumpness has been drained from her before a woman's bones could grow and harden. She is the reddish type of fair; her hair hangs dull, without fire, almost flesh?color, or the color of the flesh of certain soft trees, yews or cedars. Harry feels protective, timidly. In her tension of small bones she reminds him of Nelson. He asks her, "What do you do, Jill?"

 

"Nothing much," she says. "Hang around." It had been square of him to ask, pushing. The blacks fit around her like shadows.

 

 "Jilly's a poor soul," Babe volunteers, stirring within her buzz. "She's fallen on evil ways." And she pats Rabbit's hand as if to say, Don't you fall upon these ways.

 

"Young Jill," Buchanan clarifies, "has run away from her home up there in Connec?ticut."

 

Rabbit asks her, "Why would you do that?"

 

"Why not? Let freedom ring."

 

"Can I ask how old you are?"

 

"You can ask."

 

"I'm asking."

 

Babe hasn't let go of Rabbit's hand; with the fingernail of her index finger she is toying with the hairs on the back of his fist. It makes his teeth go cold, for her to do that. "Not so old you couldn't be her daddy," Babe says.

 

He is beginning to get the drift. They are presenting him with this problem. He is the consultant honky. The girl, too, unwilling as she is, is submitting to the interview. She inquires of him, only partly parrying, "How old are you?"

 

"Thirty?six."

 

"Divide by two."

 

"Eighteen, huh? How long've you been on the run? Away from your parents."

 

"Her daddy dead," Buchanan interposes softly.

 

"Long enough, thank you." Her face pales, her freckles stand out sharply: blood?dots that have dried brown. Her dry little lips tighten; her chin drifts toward him. She is pulling rank. He is Penn Villas, she is Penn Park. Rich kids make all the trouble.

 

"Long enough for what?"

 

"Long enough to do some sick things."

 

"Are you sick?"

 

"I'm cured."

 

Buchanan interposes, "Babe helped her out."

 

"Babe is a beautiful person," Jill says. "I was really a mess when Babe took me in."

 

` Jilly is my sweetie," Babe says, as suddenly as in playing she moves from one tune to another, ` Jilly is my baby?love and I'm her mamma?love," and takes her brown hands away from Harry's to encircle the girl's waist and hug her against the roostercomb?red of her dress; the two are women, though one is a prune and the other a milkweed. Jill pouts in pleasure. Her mouth is lovable when it moves, Rabbit thinks, the lower lip bumpy and dry as if chapped, though this is not winter but the humid height of summer.

 

Buchanan is further explaining. "Fact of it is, this girl hasn't got no place regular to go. Couple weeks ago, she comes in here, not knowing I suppose the place was mostly for soul, a little pretty girl like this get in with some of the brothers they would tear her apart limb by sweet limb" ? he has to chuckle ? "so Babe takes her right away under her wing. Only trouble with that is" ? the fat man rustles closer, making the booth a squeeze ? "Babe's place is none too big, and anyways. . ."

 

The child flares up. "Anyways I'm not welcome." Her eyes widen: Rabbit has not seen their color before, they have been shadowy, moving slowly, as if their pink lids are tender or as if, rejecting instruction and inventing her own way of moving through the world, she has lost any vivid idea of what to be looking for. Her eyes are green. The dry tired green, yet one of his favorite colors, of August grass.

 

"Jilly?love," Babe says, hugging, "you the most welcome little white baby there could be."

 

Buchanan is talking only to Rabbit, softer and softer. "You know, those things happen over York way, they could happen here, and how could we protect" ? the smallest wave of his hand toward the girl lets the sentence gracefully hang; Harry is reminded of Stavros's gestures. Buchanan ends chuckling: "We be so busy keepin' holes out of our own skins. Dependin' where you get caught, being black's a bad ticket both ways!"

 

Jill snaps, "I'll be all right. You two stop it now. Stop trying to sell me to this creep. I don't want him. He doesn't want me. Nobody wants me. That's all right. I don't want anybody."

 

"Everybody wants somebody," Babe says. "I don't mind your hangin' around my place, some gentlemen mind, is all."

 

Rabbit says, "Buchanan minds," and this perception astonishes them; the two blacks break into first shrill, then jingling, laughter, and another Stinger appears on the table between his hands, pale as lemonade.

 

"Honey, it's just the visibility," Babe then adds sadly. "You make us ever so visible."

 

A silence grows like the silence when a group of adults is waiting for a child to be polite. Sullenly Jill asks Rabbit, "What do you do?"

 

"Set type," Rabbit tells her. "Watch TV. Babysit."

 

"Harry here," Buchanan explains, "had a nasty shock the other day. His wife for no good reason upped and left him."

 

"No reason at all?" Jill asks. Her mouth pouts forward, vexed and aggressive, yet her spark of interest dies before her breath is finished with the question.

 

Rabbit thinks. "I think I bored her. Also, we didn't agree politically."

 

"What about?"

 

"The Vietnam war. I'm all for it."

 

Jill snatches in her breath.

 

Babe says, "I knew those knuckles looked bad."

 

Buchanan offers to smooth it over. "Everybody at the plant is for it. We think, you don't hold 'em over there, you'll have those black?pajama fellas on the streets over here."

 

Jill says to Rabbit seriously, "You should talk to Skeeter about it. He says it was a fabulous trip. He loved it."

 

"I wouldn't know about that. I'm not saying it's pleasant to fight in or be caught in. I just don't like the kids making the criticisms. People say it's a mess so we should get out. If you stayed out of every mess you'd never get into anything."

 

"Amen," Babe says. "Life is generally shit."

 

Rabbit goes on, feeling himself get rabid, "I guess I don't much believe in college kids or the Viet Cong. I don't think they have any answers. I think they're minorities trying to bring down everything that halfway works. Halfway isn't all the way but it's better than no way."

 

Buchanan smooths on frantically. His upper lip is bubbling with sweat under his slit of a mustache. "I agree ninety?nine per cent. Enlightened self?interest is the phrase I like. The way I see, enlightened self?interest's the best deal we're likely to get down here. I don't buy pie in the sky whoever is slicing it. These young ones like Skeeter, they say All power to the people, you look around for the people, the only people around is them."

 

"Because of Toms like you," Jill says.

 

Buchanan blinks. His voice goes deeper, hurt. "I ain't no Tom, girl. That kind of talk doesn't help any of us. That kind of talk just shows how young you are. What I am is a man trying to get from Point A to Point B, from the cradle to the grave hurting the fewest people I can. Just like Harry here, if you'd ask him. Just like your late daddy, God rest his soul."

 

Babe says, hugging the stubbornly limp girl, "I just likes Jilly's spunk, she's less afraid what to do with her life than fat old smelly you, sittin' there lickin' yourself like an old cigar end." But while talking she keeps her eyes on Buchanan as if his concurrence is to be desired. Mothers and fathers, they turn up everywhere.

 

Buchanan explains to Jill with a nice levelness, "So that is the problem. Young Harry here lives in this fancy big house over in the fanciest part of West Brewer, all by himself, and never gets any tail."

 

Harry protests. &